ALBA - Unofficial Forum

What in God's name is a "real Yes alternative" when it's at home?  It seems to be code for "any pro-independence party that is not the SNP", ie. the idea is that the SNP is no longer 'really' a Yes party, thus giving Liberate Scotland a valid excuse for splitting the Yes vote on the constituency ballot next year, etc, etc.  Well, I can tell you this: I've been to all but one of the local SNP branch meetings since rejoining the party in mid-January.  At first I wasn't quite sure what to expect, because if you listen to some people you'd think the SNP have been completely taken over at every level by identity politics entryists, but that hasn't been my experience at all.  Pretty much everyone at the meetings seems to have joined the party because of independence.  They also care about social justice issues, and some talk about subjects they have particular professional expertise about, but independence is the number one priority for one and all.  

So a question: how can a party composed of literally tens of thousands of genuine independence supporters not be a "real Yes" party?  I suppose the argument might be that there's a disconnect between the "real Yes" members and a "fake Yes" leadership, but even if that was the case, it's surely a statement of the obvious that the party containing the overwhelming majority of the independence movement has the potential to transform itself into a vehicle for independence.  If all else fails, one way that could happen is via the next SNP leadership election, whenever it comes up.

As for the much smaller parties that have been designated as "real Yes", it's a matter of record that I was not only supportive of Alba, I was in fact a card-carrying member of the party for well over three years.  Towards the end I was not at all happy with Alba's direction of travel and I thought the scale of the party's intervention in a first-past-the-post general election was a dreadful error.  But I took the view that this in not America, and in this country you don't (to misquote Katy Perry) "change parties like a girl changes clothes".  If you join a party, you've made a commitment, and if that party goes astray, you don't walk away unless there's a very good reason - you instead roll up your sleeves and try to fix the problems, or at the very least try to push for change.  That's exactly what I did - I got stuck in, stood in the Alba internal elections, got elected to several committees, and did my absolute level best to insist on due process in the Disciplinary Committee and to give the party a real internal democracy via the Constitution Review Group.  All I got for my efforts was to be unceremoniously thrown out of the party on gibberish trumped-up charges that no speaker of any known version of the English language has been able to make head nor tail of.  So it's redundant and bordering on offensive to say with a sense of entitlement that I am not living up to some kind of 'duty' to support the Alba Party.  The Alba Party made abundantly clear that it did not want my support, and it sent exactly the same message to countless other good independence supporters.  

There are two things that Alba is definitely not and never has been.  It is not a participative "member-led" party, and it is not a vehicle for delivering independence.  It is simply a fan club set up to give status, funding and a platform to a small and exceedingly nasty clique centred around Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh.  If you're an independence supporter, do not waste a further second of your time on Alba.  It's never going to deliver what you want.  It's never going to deliver anything worth having.

As for Liberate Scotland, they've disqualified themselves from the off by bringing the nativist party Sovereignty into the fold, complete with far-right policies on withholding citizenship rights from "non-Scots" on some sort of ill-defined ethnicity criteria, a total ban on "economic migration", and withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights.  I don't buy the argument that you shouldn't judge people by the company they keep, because it seems highly unlikely that Barrhead Boy would ever have been so comfortable with an electoral pact with Sovereignty unless he agreed with a fair number of their dodgier policies.  Even during his Alba days, one of his hobby-horses was withdrawing voting rights from English people living in Scotland. When I disagreed with him publicly about that, Alex Salmond phoned me up to say he couldn't have two members of "his NEC" in open conflict with each other (funny that - I thought the NEC was an elected body representing Alba members, but apparently not), but he stressed that he vehemently disagreed with Barrhead Boy about narrowing the franchise and asked me to trust him to "sort it out quietly" in some sort of unspecified way.  Perhaps in a roundabout sense he actually kept his word on that, judging by the fact that the hard core of blood and soil nutters now seem to be in Liberate Scotland rather than Alba.

So if you want to lecture people on the need to support a credible pro-independence alternative to the SNP, first of all you'd have to actually create such an entity, because at the moment it simply doesn't exist.